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Welcome to the Macaulay Library
BirdNote sounds come from this library!
© William Macaulay
The crisp song of a cardinal . . . the goofy call of a Willow Ptarmigan . . . You can hear these recordings and 150,000 others when you log on to the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The bird sounds you hear on BirdNote come from this library. Linda Macaulay, after whom the library is named (and pictured here), invites you to experience the wonder of the online archive: “You can hear birds everywhere and the recordings encourage environmental awareness. Come online and listen! It’s easy, it’s fun and it’s rewarding.”
BirdNote®
Welcome to The Macaulay Library!
Written by Chris Peterson
This is BirdNote!
[Song of male Northern Cardinal]
The clear crisp song of a Cardinal…[Song of male Northern Cardinal]...the goofy call of a Willow Ptarmigan [call of Willow Ptarmigan]…You can hear these recordings and 150,000 others when you log on to the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
[Call of Yellow-billed Loon]
The bird sounds you hear on BirdNote come from this Library and, as you might imagine, most were not easy to record. Gerrit Vyn is one who travelled to the arctic to get the calls of the Yellow-billed Loon:
“Trying to record Loons has been a really frustrating thing for us to do. The first year when we went up there I actually spent 12 hours under a piece of camouflage cloth waiting for Yellow-billed Loons to call. We had a pair that were swimming right around the microphone and we didn’t get a peep out of them.”
[Call of Yellow-billed Loon]
But, like other recordists, he persisted, helping make the archive of natural sounds
the world’s largest. And now, some 95,000 of the analog reel-to-reel recordings have been converted into digital format. Here’s Linda Macaulay, after whom the Library is named:
“I would love for people to be exposed to the many sounds of birds – to have a chance to think about and appreciate nature more. You can hear birds everywhere and the recordings encourage environmental awareness. Come online and listen! It’s easy, it’s fun and it’s rewarding.”
The Macaulay Library is a wonderful resource. To find the link, begin at birdnote.org.
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Bird sounds provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Song of the Northern Cardinal [105598] recorded by G.A. Keller; call of the Willow Ptarmigan [105769] recorded by G.A. Keller; and call of the Yellow-billed Loon [uned.] recorded by G. Vyn.
BirdNote's theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2013 Tune In to Nature.org May 2013 Narrator: Michael Stein
ID# macaulay-01-2013-05-08macaulay-01
Chris Peterson
Writer